How To Be A Good Product Manager

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How To Be A Good Product Manager is a blog that provides resources and tips on good product management practices. While it focuses more on managing technical and online products, most of the concepts are appropriate for broader product management purposes.

Four Healthcare Product Management Trends for 2018
We work with b-to-b product management teams across many industries at SiriusDecisions, but lately we’ve been with more product management teams in companies that are healthcare-focused (e.g. healthcare information technology, medical devices, health analytics) as well as product management teams that have “horizontal” products (e.g. content management) where the organization is targeting healthcare as a key growth area.

While the priorities of product management leaders are fairly consistent, there are a four trends that are taking on increased importance for healthcare-focused product management that I cover in this post on the SiriusDecisions blog: increasing focus on solutions; compliance with a defined product lifecycle process; Better understanding of users, and the various types of users; and increased focus on value-based pricing.

Twitter Chat: February 13
Speaking of product management trends, I’ll be part of a SiriusDecisions Twitter Chat on Product Management Trends for 2018 on Tuesday, February 13 at 1pm ET / 10am PT / 18:00 GMT.

If you’ve never participated in a Twitter Chat, here’s how it works:

Log in to your Twitter account and go to the Twitter account @siriusdecisions on Tuesday, February 13th at 1pm ET.

We’ll pose a series of questions related to product management trends, and you reply with your answers. Make sure to use the hashtag #SiriusChat when you tweet so we (and others) can easily see your responses.

I’ll be answering the questions too, responding to your answers, and probably posing more questions. Follow the #SiriusChat hashtag to see all the action. We’ve got more information — and you can sign up to get a calendar reminder — on our Twitter Chat page.

What’s Hot on Twitter
Here are a few of my recent tweets that have generated the most interest recently; to get these in real-time, join the 8600+ others who follow me at @jefflash:

Product managers should care LESS about what features their competitors' products have and MORE about whether those competing products solve customer needs better than their own.

Happy 2018! It’s been a few months but I’m back with some big news for 2018, including a (long-overdue) site redesign that, among other things, should look much better on mobile devices. I’m still tweaking some things, so bear with me. In the meantime, I’ve been busy blogging…

Helping Product Managers Triumph in an Agile World: The SiriusDecisions Agile Engine for Product Management
Many product management leaders in organizations that use agile as a product development process express that they’re challenged to get their people to not just act as product owners in an agile/scrum sense, but as product managers who are responsible for the overall commercial success of the product. On an almost daily basis, I’m talking to product management leaders who find that agile is causing their product managers to focus too much on short-term tactical activities that are isolated from the broader product strategy and lifecycle. This isn’t a failure of agile but it is due to the lack of a structured way of getting product managers to connect what’s happening at the sprint level to releases and product strategy. In this post on the SiriusDecisions blog — Helping Product Managers Triumph in an Agile World: The SiriusDecisions Agile Engine for Product Management — I explain more about how product teams can overcome these challenges and unveil our new framework that describes how product management’s strategic and lifecycle management responsibilities need to adapt and mesh with an agile product development approach.

Help! Sales Is Trying to Change My Product Roadmap!
Another topic that we’re hearing about regularly in our work with b-to-b product teams is the challenges of making progress on a strategic roadmap when salespeople are always “requesting” features or capabilities that threaten to derail your roadmap. In my post on the SiriusDecisions blog Help! Sales Is Trying to Change My Product Roadmap!, I offer some advice on how to shift your thinking (hint: It’s not your roadmap) and offer four specific tips to improve your innovation and product management processes to better leverage customer and sales feedback.

Upcoming Events
Spring is always a big season for events, and this is shaping up to be another busy one. There are a number of things on my calendar, but here’s a select few where you will be able to find me in person:

ProductCamp St. Louis: March 3: I’m helping to organize our 7th annual ProductCamp in the Gateway City. Last year we had over 400 registrants for a fantastic (and free!) day of learning and sharing among product people of all kinds.

SiriusDecisions Summit: May 8-10: We’ll be back in Las Vegas this year for the biggest SiriusDecisions event, bringing more than 3,200 sales, marketing and product leaders together for three full days of data-driven best practices research, unveiling of new innovations across the b-to-b space and networking with an elite community of sales, marketing and product leaders. This year we’ll have a dedicated Product Management Track, featuring presentations on implementing value-based pricing, moving “beyond” agile, and product management infrastructure (a.k.a. tools and technologies for product management). Early bird pricing is good through February 28, so register now to secure a great deal!

What’s Hot on Twitter
Here are a few of my recent tweets that have generated the most interest recently; to get these in real-time, join the 8600+ others who follow me at @jefflash:

A product manager who doesn’t regularly spend time with customers is like a teacher who doesn’t regularly spend time with students.

What It Takes to Become a Great Product Manager; nice to see #prodmgmt featured in @harvardbiz but the importance of product managers understanding customer needs / market opportunities seems to get downplayed/lost in here https://t.co/Cwa8UqqWYW

There's a lot of talk how #prodmgmt needs to learn to say NO (to features that only benefit 1 customer, ideas that don't address customer needs, etc.); but also, executive teams need to learn to say NO to (some) new products, business cases, investment ideas that don't make sense

And I know it’s well past the Holiday season, but in case you missed it…

My neighbor 2 doors down puts on an amazing Christmas light display every year. I decided to join in the festivities this year too. Guess which is his house and guess which is mine. pic.twitter.com/V6qy9zEVPf

September brings about the return of kids to school, cooling temperatures, and, for product managers, an opportunity to review plans for the next year’s roadmap. While SiriusDecisions recommends reviewing product roadmaps regularly – most often quarterly – the look ahead to the new calendar year is often the time when there is a more concerted effort to refine and revise the future roadmap, especially when it is tied into annual product planning and budgeting. Read more in my post on the SiriusDecisions blog: Three Tips for Planning Next Year’s Product Roadmap

SiriusDecisions 2018 Product Management Planning Assumptions

Speaking of looking ahead to 2018, every year at SiriusDecisions we publish research on new trends and important areas that deserve additional focus for the coming year. Our 2018 Product Management Planning Assumptions cover topics like merging agile concepts with product lifecycle management, cross-product coordination, and clarifying the range of product management responsibilities, and provide guidance to product management leaders on the actions they should take. You can download the 2018 SiriusDecisions Product Management Planning Assumptions to read the full list.

Upcoming Events
If you’re in the Seattle area, please join me the evening of Thursday, October 19 for this (free!) presentation I’ll be doing on Product Strategy on a Page. An effective product strategy needs to be well-thought out and comprehensive enough to cover all of the key elements while still being concise and focused enough to be easily communicated and understood. In this talk, I’ll define product strategy and share a template for developing, documenting and communicating product strategy. Learn more and register today!

Looking ahead to 2018, if you’re starting to look at your calendar and wondering what conferences you should attend, there’s two I’d (selfishly) recommend.

First, our annual SiriusDecisions Summit (May 8 – 11, 2018 at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas), where you can join more than 3,200 b-to-b sales, marketing and product leaders for four full days of data-driven best practices research, unveiling of new innovations across the b-to-b space, lots of networking and some fun activities as well. The schedule will be announced soon, but I can share that we’re planning some new things for the product management audience this year that you won’t want to miss. There’s even an early-bird discount if you register before December 31!

Second, our first-ever SiriusDecisions Summit Canada is happening March 1, 2018 at the Hyatt Regency Toronto. In one day, you will learn how leading Canadian companies address growth, innovation and operational challenges. You’ll leave the event with a unique perspective on what’s working right now across the b-to-b space in Canada. There’s an early-bird discount through December 31 for this event too!

What’s Hot on Twitter
Here are a few of my recent tweets that have generated the most interest recently; to get these in real-time, join the 8400+ others who follow me at @jefflash:

SiriusDecisions SiriusView: Product Planning, Prioritization and Roadmapping 2017
I’m pleased to announce the release of the SiriusView “Product Planning, Prioritization and Roadmapping 2017.” This SiriusView covers seven vendors whose offerings are designed to assist product managers with developing product plans, prioritizing features and enhancements, and maintaining and communicating product roadmaps. My post on the SiriusDecisions blog — SiriusDecisions 2017 SiriusView of Product Management Tools — provides a summary of the research as well as a comparison to the initial analysis of this category of product management technologies which we released in late 2014.

Podcast: B2B Product Management with The Everyday Innovator
I was a guest on The Everyday Innovator podcast, talking about b-to-b product management and some of the specific differences and considerations. We covered questions like “How do B2B sales models impact product management?” and “How can product managers avoid the ‘one-off’ practice that some B2B organizations find themselves in – customizing a product for each customer?” You can listen to the episode online or find it through iTunes or your favorite podcast app.

Upcoming Webcast — SiriusFoundations: Product Management
One popular set of sessions from our recent SiriusDecisions Summit were our “SiriusFoundations” sessions, where we covered foundational elements of different b-to-b product, marketing and sales roles and provided an overview of core SiriusDecisions concepts, frameworks and terminology. We’re doing a repeat of the SiriusFoundations: Product Management session as a webcast on Tuesday, June 20, 2017 at 12pm ET. My colleague Lisa Singer will be covering some of the key priorities for b-to-b product management leaders and product teams as well as relevant SiriusDecisions research and models. Sign up for the webcast today!

If you can’t make it for the whole 4 days, we have a special discounted 2-day (Wednesday and Thursday) pass available for product management leaders — contact the SiriusDecisions events team for more information.

Hope to see you there, and if you can’t make it, you can still follow along at home — follow me at @jefflash and follow the hashtag #sdsummit.

2017 SiriusDecisions Product Management Tools and Technology Study

I’m pleased to announce the findings from our 2017 SiriusDecisions Product Management Tools and Technology Study, which looks at what tools and technologies are being used by b-to-b product managers. While product managers traditionally have not used technology nearly as much as their counterparts in product development, marketing and sales – nor have they had as much technology available to them – the results from this study show that this is changing.

You can download a copy of the 2017 SiriusDecisions Product Management Tools and Technology Study to see the full results, which includes information on what technologies are used most often by product managers, how many product managers are using product management-specific tools, their satisfaction level with such tools, and much more!

What’s Hot on Twitter
Here are a few of my tweets that have generated the most interest recently; to get these in real-time, join the 8000+ others who follow me at @jefflash:

Also applies if you change "founders" to "product managers" and "business" to… well, you can probably keep that nowthatIthinkaboutit https://t.co/YDSNfHuhzq

March 7-8: I’ll be at Pendomonium: A Product Experience in Raleigh, NC, which will feature two days of sessions on product management, UX and customer success. On Tuesday I’ll be delivering a keynote presentation on SaaS and the Consumerization of Enterprise Software, and then on Wednesday I’ll be leading a breakout session on Product Management: What’s Changing and What Needs to Change? Use the code PendoSaaStr2017 for a 20% discount on registration.

I was interviewed by Karthik Vijayakumar (@kartvee) for a recent episode of his Design Your Thinking podcast. You can download or stream the episode (~38 minutes long) where we cover everything from the importance to empathy to mistakes product managers make in understanding customers to how to develop a “product mindset.”

I’ve got a few exciting things going on right now so here’s a quick update…

Establishing a Product Management Function

Through my work at SiriusDecisions, I’ve been helping several organizations that are setting up product management for the first time. Interestingly, in most of these cases, the challenge wasn’t convincing the organization that product management was needed — the problem was exactly how to go about setting up the new function. My blog post Four Critical Steps for Establishing a Product Management Function highlights how to get the ball rolling in a situation like this. Many more steps are required to go from simply setting up product management to building out a best-in-class function, but following the steps I outline in my blog post will certainly start an organization down the right path.

One area that I’ve been involved in lately is with companies applying agile outside of their product development teams and specifically within the marketing organization. This is an interesting area for me, since I’ve been involved in agile development from a product management perspective for about a decade. Though this might be a bit off-topic for the more product management-focused readers of my blog, since this is a subject that has come up with several product management teams lately, I wanted to share a few things I’ve been working on.

On February 9 at 2 p.m. ET, I’ll be presenting a webcast called “Applying Agile: How It Can Help and When It Doesn’t.” During the webcast, I’ll share a framework for preparing your organization to evaluate and implement agile outside of product development – and within marketing in particular.

Ten Year Anniversary!
On December 4, 2006, I published my first post on this blog, where I wrote, “If you want to be a good product manager, share your knowledge. Realize that you have lessons to share but even more to learn. Know that you improve your own skills and expertise when you teach others. … So that’s why I’m starting this blog — to share what I’ve learned, to help me, to help you, and to maybe in some small way help everyone. ”

That’s certainly what I’ve tried to do here, on Twitter (as @jefflash), other places where I’ve written, given presentations and been interviewed, and, for the past four years, in my role at SiriusDecisions providing help and guidance to b-to-b product management leaders and their teams.

Looking back over the past ten years, I’m gratified to see that I’ve been able to follow through on that early vision (and quite frankly pretty surprised at how accurately, too). I wasn’t really sure where the blog would go from that first post, and I don’t think 10 years ago I could have predicted most of what’s happened since then.

One of the best things that’s come out of this blog is getting to hear from people who have benefited from this blog along the way. I’ve heard from people who’ve realized they wanted to go into product management in part by reading this blog. I’ve heard from people who’ve told me that this blog helped them get their first product management job (or a new product management job). I’ve heard from people who’ve sent a link to their boss or coworker because it did a great job articulating a point they were trying to get across or because it highlighted something they hadn’t ever thought of before. I’ve heard from people who took my ideas and built on them or connected my ideas to their own related ideas. I’ve heard from people who disagree with me, and they presented arguments that made me rethink (and even change) some of my positions. I’ve heard from people who translated my posts into other languages, allowing my words to reach whole new audiences. I’ve gotten to meet a lot of readers and other bloggers in person, and I can’t begin to quantify the value of the personal and professional connections I’ve made along the way.

The anniversary date snuck up on me, so I didn’t have a ton of time to put my thoughts together, but it seemed appropriate to share some high-level “numbers” as I start the second decade here:

It’s amazing to think about how much has changed since this blog started in 2006 — on the web, of course, but also for me personally and professionally. I would be remiss if I didn’t say a big THANK YOU to everyone who’s been part of this journey along the way — readers, commenters, collaborators, colleagues, family, and friends. Without you, I never would have made it to 2016. I’m not sure what things will be like in 2026, but I’m looking forward to the next 10 years, and I’m glad you’re here to continue the journey with me.

Other things I’ve been working on
With the end of 2016 in sight, things aren’t slowing down at all. Here’s a few other things I’ve been working on:

I’ll be in San Francisco this Friday, December 9 to present a keynote on “Sorting out Product Marketing and Product Management” at the Product Marketing Community conference. Tickets are still available; use the discount code JEFFVIP (because if you’re reading this, you’re a VIP!) for $100 off.

I wrote a post for the SiriusDecisions Marketplace blog on “Going Agile” In Marketing – How Is It Different? — an interesting topic for me since my experience with clients who are implementing agile as a product development process has led to many conversations with companies looking to implement agile within marketing.

What’s Hot on Twitter
Here are a few of my tweets that have generated the most interest recently; to get these in real-time, join the 7400+ others who follow me at @jefflash:

Amazing how companies spend millions of $ building products but neglect market research for said products b/c they "don't have budget"